


A Future Built on These Foundations

by newtypeshadow



Category: Captain America (Movies), Doctor Strange (2016), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers Tower, Bucky Barnes Gets a Hug, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Communication, Domestic Avengers, Fate, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Kissing, M/M, Magic, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Spells & Enchantments, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Gets a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-06 00:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20497553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newtypeshadow/pseuds/newtypeshadow
Summary: Some things are inevitable—Tony Stark learns this the hard way.Still, sometimes one small change is enough.





	A Future Built on These Foundations

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the AU Yeah August 2019 day 30 prompt “Time Travel”. Posted late because this is the first time all week I’ve had time and energy and quiet enough to do it. >_>
> 
> This fic was inspired by a line in the _Odd Thomas_ film: Odd says we have free will, but there is also fate, and sometimes no matter what you do to avoid something, fate winds things around so you end up right back there anyway.

Nothing he does changes anything.

Tony’s saved Bucky from Zola a dozen times, in a dozen different ways, since his fall down the ravine—yet Hydra always claims him in the end, and he becomes their ghost assassin right on schedule.

Tony saves his parents a dozen times, in a dozen different ways, from dying on that highway on December 16, 1991—and every time they survive a would-be attack from the Winter Soldier, they die some other way on that same night.

Tony invented time travel so the Avengers could save the world.

He uses it selfishly afterward (as they say) because of a boy.

He hoped to save his parents (his mom) from dying at the hands of the man he desperately wants, and save Bucky from the guilt and shame Tony still sees in his eyes whenever Tony tries to take their flirtation from repartee to _more_.

“Tony, I killed your _parents_,” Bucky’d said the night Tony finally asked him out. “I know what losing your ma did to you. And maybe _you_ can forgive me for that, but I can’t.”

Between the despair in Bucky’s eyes and the self-recrimination in his words, Tony’s stomach had plummeted and his bones felt hollowed out. His body went cold, but his face and ears burned with humiliation and anger—some at Bucky, for turning down something Tony knows they both want, and for not being able to forgive himself when Tony already had; but mostly at how magnificently Hydra had fucked Tony over the night they killed his parents—their unwanted gift that keeps on giving. “If you hadn’t…if it wasn’t you that did it, would you have said yes?” Tony found himself asking. Maybe it was masochism, but perhaps even then he’d had an inkling of what he might do to fix it.

Bucky had smiled then, sweet and sad and besotted all in the curling of his lips. “I’d be crazy not to, doll.” And then his smile fell. “But I did it.”

Tony hadn’t argued—had instead let Bucky hide in his room after that—already distracted by how, exactly, to save his parents from Bucky Barnes.

He’d armored up and blinked into the past and shot the Winter Soldier right off his motorcycle. Knocked him out and dropped him off three towns away.

But when he caught up to his parents’ car, it was smashed into a tree and its trunk relieved of super soldier serum.

Tony learns with each successive attempt that he can save his parents from Bucky, but not death.

The Ancient One finds him after he’s given up on stopping Zola, and instead gone all in on heading off Bucky, only to find he’s accidentally left his parents to succumb to Hydra’s most elite death squad (they toyed with his parents; his mother died screaming), or a hitman hired by Obadiah Stane (Obie made sure Howard knew he’d push Tony so far down a path of hedonistic debauchery he’d be unfit to run Stark Industries—and that if Tony shaped up and tried to take the reins, Obie’d kill him too), or his father’s alcoholism (only a small drink before he left the house that night, but it slowed his reaction times just enough), or a freak accident caused by other motorists (whose lives, if they survived, were ruined), or a low-flying goose or a deer running across the road (humiliating ways for a Stark to die).

“You can’t save them,” the Ancient One tells him. “There is much we can control, but there are some things fate has decreed, and despite our resistance, the world pushes us inexorably toward them. Hydra _will_ claim your friend, and the people he killed will die—too much of the future is built upon those foundations for the timeline to support their undoing. Your parents _will_ die tonight, Mr. Stark. All that you can change is who is responsible.” She taps his time bracelet, and Tony feels a rush of power sizzle through it. “This will take you back in time only once more. After that, it will return you to your own time—_and you will stay there_.” It sounds like an order, a warning, and a spell set into motion all at once.

So Tony goes back one last time and saves his parents from Bucky and Hydra. He returns to the highway in time to watch Obadiah Stane’s hitman drive away.

Tony blinks back into the present day and feels himself bound to it, somehow, like he’s Peter Pan newly sewn to his shadow. The minute changes to the timeline assert themselves in the form of a migraine and new memories integrating with the old, his brain a defragging computer re-sorting itself in an eye-throbbing rush.

Now, there has never been remorse and shame in Bucky’s eyes when he accepts Tony’s kindness or flirtation.

Now, there has always been a grateful awe in Bucky’s gaze when he looks at the Mark XXII—the armor that stopped him from killing Howard and Maria Stark.

Now, there has always been this secret knowledge between them: Bucky met Iron Man on December 16, 1991, and Iron Man stopped him from murdering a man who’d been his friend—stopped him from committing an assassination that would’ve haunted him more than any other, had it ever happened.

This time, when Tony asks if Bucky wants to go out with him, Bucky grins, a slow, quiet thing, and his expression is full of heat and light when he says, “I’d be crazy not to, doll. Just been waitin’ for you to ask.”

They eat sushi on the roof of the Tower as the sun goes down behind the Manhattan skyscrapers, and shoot the breeze cuddled together on a patio couch in the center of the community garden Bruce and Pepper started a month ago.

Their legs are tangled together, and Bucky has taken Tony’s free hand in both of his, is studying Tony’s fingers and their articulation with the same focus and fascination Tony uses fine-tuning Bucky’s metal arm, when conversation lulls and Bucky’s body tenses slightly. “It was you, wasn’t it,” he says, “the night Hydra sent me after Howard and the serum. You kept me from doing it.”

Tony hesitates, then nods, eyes tight with unhappiness at the many memories it conjures up: his parents, dead so many ways, and the Winter Soldier’s hauntingly empty expression on Bucky’s animated face.

“Thank you,” Bucky says, his dextrous fingers massaging the thick of Tony’s hand, and it’s suddenly easier to breathe.

“I couldn’t save you,” Tony admits softly. “Any of you. Fate wouldn’t let me. You always became the Winter Soldier. My parents always died that night. No matter what I did, it always…” He shakes his head and sighs. There was nothing more he could’ve done, he _knows_ that—but he still feels like he failed them.

Bucky wraps his metal arm around Tony and pulls him closer, laces their fingers together. “You saved me enough,” he says. “You made sure it wasn’t me.”

The understanding in Bucky’s tone startles Tony into looking up at him.

Bucky doesn’t remember, but he _knows_.

“I don’t think I could forgive myself if I’d done it.” Bucky’s gaze is shrewd when he wryly adds, “But I’m guessing you already know that.”

Tony curls his hand into the back of Bucky’s shirt, presses his nose to the soft sleeve covering the hard metal shoulder, and says nothing. What he did was selfish—he knows that even if Bucky doesn’t. He did it so he could have nights like this, pressed against Bucky on the roof of the Tower without Maria’s ghost haunting Bucky’s eyes, and Howard’s glaring down at him. He did it so Bucky could smile at him without guilt, could walk around the Tower without acting like he was stealing from Tony just by being there. He did it so when he asked Bucky out, Bucky could give the answer they both wanted instead of the only one he thought he deserved.

Part of Tony wishes he’d lost that first set of memories like everyone else.

Bucky’s eyes soften, and he leans in to kiss Tony’s forehead. “I’m so grateful for what you did, doll.” He lets go of Tony’s hand to tilt his face up into a kiss that’s soft and sweet and heavy as the spell binding Tony to the present. “Thank you.” He leans in again.

Tony lets the thanks slide away unaccepted, but the syrupy warmth of Bucky’s kisses pours through the chinks in his armor and soothes him nonetheless.

When Bucky pulls away, Tony doesn’t know how much time has passed, or when his eyes closed, or how he ended up on his back with Bucky’s weight anchoring him to the moment. But Bucky must still read something on Tony’s face, because he kisses the curve of Tony’s jaw. “You remember, don’t you,” he says, and it’s not a question. “Am I happier now?”

Tony can’t help the unmanly and probably inappropriate giggle that escapes him, or the grin that breaks across his face as he nods, because yes, dear god _yes_. He’d never known Bucky could smile like he does now before he’d gone back in time. “Little bit, yeah.”

Bucky snorts. “Looks like a little more ’n that to me.” He noses his way into another kiss—which Tony thinks is shoddy craftsmanship on both their parts on account of their unbroken smiles. “You’re happier this way too?” Bucky asks, like this time he’s not sure he knows the answer.

But how could Tony not be happier now, with Bucky’s chest pressed against his and Bucky’s hands on his skin, and the shadows of Bucky’s guilt so long ago dissolved because now the Tower and Tony himself aren’t constant reminders of the evils he once did? “‘Course I am.” Tony frowns, reviews his new memories of life in the Tower laid against the old, and— “Huh. We _all_ are, now I think about it,” he mutters.

Knowing Obie had planned to kill his parents as surely as he’d planned to kill Tony, and that maybe the worst parts of himself during his darkest years hadn’t been entirely on him, was doing a lot towards helping him forgive himself for who he’d been and stop blaming himself for Obie’s betrayal and subsequent death.

Forgiveness seems to come easier this time around for Tony, Bucky, and even Steve: forgiving each other, forgiving themselves. They’re all far less haunted than they were before Tony went back and changed things.

The look Bucky gives Tony then is unabashedly fond, and a little bit shy. “And you and me—_we’re_ better this way?”

Tony nods guiltily.

“Did what you did hurt anybody?”

Tony shakes his head. _Just me_, he doesn’t say.

Bucky’s mouth tightens as if he heard anyway. He cups Tony’s face, strokes his thumbs down Tony’s cheeks, and says softly, firmly, “Then you did a good thing, Tony. Doesn’t matter to me why or how—you still did a good thing. You saved us both a lot a’ heartache without hurtin’ anybody else. Made things better, like you always do.”

His kiss now is slow and familiar, comfortable, like they’ve been doing it for decades, and it slows a frenetic part of Tony’s brain into still, careful attention.

“Thank you,” Bucky repeats.

This time, Tony’s mind doesn’t rebel outright at Bucky’s gratitude. This time, when Bucky releases his lips and gazes at him with awe and thanks and like he hung the stars in the sky to spell out Bucky’s name, Tony starts to believe that what he did—the most he could do, all that he could change—might have been enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading—I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, please do leave kudos and even a comment to let me know. ^_^


End file.
